I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

Wow. Great article. The little gem above is his take on his imminent passage from life. I’ve always been fascinated by death, and by what the people who are palpably facing it have to say about it.

Only after I have spent every spare hour on craigslist—browsing the ads, tracking the spam, reading the help forums, contacting users—do I finally begin to grasp something of his situation. The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don’t work as well as they’d like. By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist’s programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. Here’s the lesson: The public is a motherfucker.

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess

Good, and long, article on the state of Craigslist. Interesting read from a sociology, psychology, UI design, product manager and tech geek standpoint.

The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

The whole article goes beyond interesting. Personally I cannot find fault with a single idea or suggestion. This needs to happen. And as discouraging as it is to see how many pieces of our system are truly broken, it’s encouraging to know there are people thinking through viable solutions. There is hope.

I quoted this particular section because it reminds me of one of the strongest memories I have from traveling through Malaysia and Thailand 10 years ago. The name of the small town we spent the night at in Northern Malaysia eludes me, but the images of its open-air market, not to mention the smells, are very present. Particularly the stroll we took through the “fish gauntlet” where piles of dozens of different kinds of raw fresh fish lay out on slaps of concrete serving as display tables. While it smelled terrible, it certainly tasted good prepared by the local food vendors that night. Same for the live chickens and goats and fresh produce and everything else that was brought, caught, picked, or killed immediately before being presented to the consumer in the sweltering heat of the mid-morning market.

Very few Americans have any connection to what they eat, and it shows.

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

The New Yorker - Undecided

by David Sedaris

Too true.

(thx DF)

→ SAR (Specific Absorption Rate)

Walking the line between convenience and caution…

I don’t consider myself a heavy cell phone user (in fact I’ve never been much of a phone person, preferring face-to-face communication), but think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in this case.

Enter SAR values.

FWIW I use my left ear 95% of the time figuring that if I’m baking my brain it might as well be my left brain, preserving the more creative right brain for later in life. Yep — I’ll be that crazy old artist guy with the plaid shorts and coffee-stained shirt combing the discards along the highway for my “found object” collages. I won’t remember your name, but I’ll smile just the same.

It’s a start…

→ "The Deal With Las Vegas"

Oh man, oh man… If I didn’t have family in Vegas, my personal experiences with the place would have left me typing something similar.